“Should I Perform This Music?”

Abstract: This essay addresses cultural appropriation in music not as a problem to be solved through fixed rules or binary judgments, but as an ongoing ethical practice grounded in intent, relationship, and accountability. Centered on a decision-making chart designed for use rather than theoretical mastery, the article situates musical engagement within dynamic communities shaped by difference, power, and mutual indebtedness. Drawing on critical scholarship, classroom experience, and responses from multiple scholars and artists, the essay reframes appropriation away from simple distinctions between appreciation and theft, emphasizing instead how musical meaning emerges through lived interaction, affective experience, and social consequence.

Through dialogic reflection and critique, the essay foregrounds the limits of critique alone and argues for generative, process-oriented approaches to ethical music-making. Contributors highlight how questions of freedom, empathy, identity, labor, and privilege intersect in musical encounters, particularly for students and musicians navigating activist fatigue, creative desire, and fear of harm. Rather than offering definitive answers, the essay insists on ambiguity, refusal, and responsibility as necessary components of ethical musical practice. Ultimately, it proposes that cultivating relationships, acknowledging indebtedness, and remaining open to discomfort are central to making music that aspires toward justice, mutuality, and shared futures.

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Thinking About Music History: An Introduction to Marxism

Abstract: This essay introduces Marxism as an analytical method for thinking about music history, arguing that musicology’s longstanding idealist orientation has limited its ability to grapple with capitalism, class, and material power. Beginning from the author’s own position as a disciplinary “outsider,” the essay situates Marxist analysis alongside familiar musicological engagements with gender, race, and sexuality, highlighting the field’s relative neglect of political economy. It outlines key Marxist concepts (such as the means of production, private property, labor, wage relations, ideology, and materialism) and explains how these ideas offer a framework for understanding music not as an abstract realm of ideas but as a set of practices embedded in historical relations of power, exploitation, and social reproduction.

The essay then demonstrates the usefulness of a Marxist approach through a case study of racism in U.S. classical music institutions, focusing on how idealist diversity initiatives obscure the material histories and ongoing functions of elite cultural spaces. Drawing on theories of racial capitalism and urban redevelopment, the essay shows how institutions like Lincoln Center have been implicated in displacement, wealth extraction, and racialized inequality, even as they position themselves as agents of cultural inclusion. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the article argues that Marxist analysis clarifies the structural limits of institutional reform and redirects attention toward broader material conditions that shape musical life. Ultimately, the essay positions Marxism as a flexible, evolving toolkit that enables music historians to ask new questions about labor, value, race, and power across musical repertoires and historical contexts.

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